Freeing Leonard Peltier and building the anti-war movement:

Published February 8th, 2007

February marks the 31st year that Native American activist Leonard Peltier has lived in a prison cell as a political prisoner. He was the target of an F.B.I. frame-up in response to the shooting of two agents during the governments’ occupation/war against progressive Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the early 1970s. He is kept in prison despite gaping holes in the government’s case because freeing him would expose the politically vengeful, racist, and fraudulent nature of the entire “justice system” that set him up. Moreover, throughout his years in prison Leonard Peltier has continued telling the truth as he sees it about the crimes of U.S. imperialism against Native Americans, the Iraqi people, and all of oppressed humanity. This is another likely reason the authorities keep him locked up, and another reason for justice-loving people to fight for his release.

February is also the Tacoma Leonard Peltier Support Group (LPSG)’s 14th Annual NW Leonard Peltier March in Tacoma. Leonard has had good legal people working on his case for decades, and well-known personalities and organizations all over the world have called for his freedom. It is necessary to fight on this front. The decisive issue in forcing the government to free a political prisoner, however, is building a mass movement for their release. This is part of the work to advance struggles of the oppressed masses on all fronts. The LPSG helps build this mass movement through its annual marches to demand Leonard’s freedom, by working to rally support for Native American struggles, and by fanning the flames of discontent against the war in Iraq and the growing U.S. police state.

Leonard Peltier became active as a young man when the Native American movement surged forward: from the struggle for treaty rights at Frank’s Landing and on the banks of the Puyallup; to the struggles of urban Indians in Chicago, Minneapolis, and in prisons; to the struggle on the Pine Ridge Reservation and Wounded Knee II—with many, many more battles in between. These Native American struggles were fueled and inspired by the mass actions of the African American people, the Vietnamese national liberation war, the battles of the anti-war movement in the streets of the U.S., and other movements. The Native American struggles in turn fueled and inspired these movements.

This great mass upsurge was already declining when Leonard Peltier was imprisoned, and it declined further in the next decades. There were bleak years for those working for the freedom of Leonard, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and other political prisoners. But today the anti-war movement again has momentum, while last year a huge movement for immigrant rights developed. Although there is not yet a huge movement in full swing, recent developments show that work to help bring one about will eventually bear fruit. And, an important part of such work is to orient the various movements of the oppressed against the common enemy, as well as work to win the masses within these movements to conscious and active support for the struggles others are waging. Successes along this path will give the demand for Leonard’s release a new authority.

Imperialism is the common enemy that the struggles of Native Americans and the anti-war movement both confront, and it’s the logical product of the capitalist system of production—a system that Native Americans have been resisting the effects of for 500 years! By the beginning of the 20th Century capitalism had already given rise to the merger of industrial and banking capital into huge conglomerations of wealth (monopolies) in the most industrially advanced countries; and they now divided the globe between themselves with their respective governments fighting war after war to advance their interests by dominating markets, sources of raw materials, and low-wage labor. This imperialist system is the cause of the Iraqi occupation, and it plunders Indian reservations as well. As the Tacoma LPSG so correctly says, “…The war in Iraq is about oil and the interests of the multi-national energy corporations. Behind the events that took place on the Pine Ridge Reservation were the interests of the multi-national energy corporations wanting uranium that was found there. In both cases armed force was used to seize control of those resources and to suppress opposition.”

“Let’s be honest. There is much to be gained by taking Iraq by force—for the US, for the multinational corporations—and very little, if anything, of the administration’s actions is about liberating Iraq’s people from a tyrannical regime…Iraqi oil is the key. It means everything in this so-called ‘War on Terror’…But the greed doesn’t end there. Reports in the last few weeks show private American corporations—profiteers like Vice-president Dick Cheney’s former employer—are already in place, ready to take government contracts to rebuild a war-ravaged country blown apart by American bombs and to service military personnel that this administration plans to house there. An occupation force, then…War is good for business.” -Leonard Peltier

Indeed, the young people of this country are being sent to kill and be killed in the interests of the oil giants and business, i.e., profit-making by the rich through capitalist expansion. Even more than in Vietnam these are sons and daughters of the working people, and especially sons and daughters of impoverished Native Americans, African Americans, and other discriminated against national minorities whose only reason for enlisting is that modern capitalism denies them jobs, job-training or higher education anywhere else. Thus the Native American youth (and their parents!) have a special interest in joining and building the anti-war movement, while other anti-war activists have interests in supporting the struggles of Native Americans.

During the imperialist aggression against Vietnam, Native Americans here in the Northwest were an important part of the anti-war movement, i.e., draft resisters and active-duty G.I.s repeatedly spoke at anti-war events, they joined with thousands of others to man barricades set up in Seattle’s University District, they organized against the war among tribal members, and so on. Other anti-war activists responded to calls from Native Americans to come to Ft. Lawton, and then to help defend the Puyallup’s Tacoma fishing encampment. Later, some of them joined with local Native Americans who traveled to Pine Ridge.

Today, Native Americans again participate in the anti-war movement, while other anti-war activists participate in the annual Leonard Peltier marches. Clearly, however, these are trends that need to be built further. To do so requires shedding light on what imperialism is, and of how it’s the common enemy. It requires work to expose that neither party in Washington offers a solution to the nightmare the U.S. has brought to Iraq because as long as millions of people continue to think the Democrats will do something against Bush’s war they’re less likely to get active against it.

Bush is now escalating this bloody war in Iraq, and the escalation may involve twice the number of troops that he first stated. The Democrats’ response is to posture against this by offering non-binding resolutions against funding it. They promise to continue funding the war however, just as they always have. And, with the U.S. imperial military project in the Middle East facing defeat while mass opposition develops at home, the Democrats (and moderate Republicans) also offer “withdrawal” plans. But these plans always involve more fighting, and they’re usually conditioned on meeting objectives that four years of war have been unable to attain. They talk of redeploying U.S. troops, but what they mean is shifting their mission somewhat, or moving troops out of certain areas, or moving them to the “periphery” of Iraq in order to launch attacks from there. For example, Liberal Jim McDermott compliments Bush’s saber-rattling against Iran with a call to re-deploy U.S. troops to the Iranian border. In the name of “withdrawal” these are alternative military strategies aimed at achieving the same end: imperialist domination of the oil-rich Middle East.

The Democrats act this way because they’re just as much an imperialist party as the Republicans are. We must therefore rely on ourselves and on anti-imperialist ideas to arouse the masses for struggle against imperialist barbarism abroad and at home. This is how all of the great movements of the 60s and 70s were built; with Leonard Peltier being just one of thousands of very ordinary Native American people who took political matters into their own hands. Today he writes “Our work will be unfinished until not one human being is hungry or battered, not one single person is forced to die in war, not one innocent languishes imprisoned and no one is persecuted for his or her beliefs.” The struggle must continue.

Free Leonard Peltier!
Build the movement against imperialist war!

Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee, February 8, 2007